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Monday, November 14, 2005

Great story for I Love to Read week!

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Nov. 11 - Rushing to evacuate her home as a forest fire lapped at the edges of this high-desert town in May 2000, Kathryn Gursky took with her just one book, a British edition of "The World of Pooh," by A. A. Milne, bought when she and her husband were vacationing in Dorset some 11 years earlier.

When she returned to Los Alamos after the fire, Ms. Gursky, a 49-year-old former librarian, found that the rest of her 2,300-volume personal library had burned, along with her house and everything in it.

To kick off the rebirth of her library, her husband birthday gifted her with "the complete collection of the Penguin Classics Library, 1,082 books sold only by Amazon.com for nearly $8,000."

This is a great story for book lovers. Gursky is a voracious reader.

"We don't own a TV set," Ms. Gursky said, by way of explaining how she has had time to read a new book roughly every two days since the collection arrived. With four cats but no children, "we don't have anything better to do" than read, she said.

If a fire (or hurricane) threatened, we would have to grab our Lord of the Rings books. What book(s) would you grab?

We really did throw in a few books when we fled Rita: a family genealogy book that I had written in, Organizer Daughter's Harry Potter books, and some others chosen randomly--oh, yes, and school books.

Like Kelly I'm afraid of fire and on the couple of occasions that someone's cooking has set off the fire alarms in this house, I've high-tailed it down the stairs without sparing a thought for anything other than getting myself out !

Lovely present though. I wish someone would buy it for me (mind you, they'd also have to buy me somewhere to house it, since I couldn't fit another 1000+ books into this tiny attic ! :-D